Digestion and Resistance at zürich moves 2019

The 2019 edition of the zürich moves! festival of contemporary performing arts practice was organized around the theme On Eating and Being Eaten, nodding to the Brazilian intellectual tradition of cultural anthropophagy. I attended the festival and, across a week of performances, encountered a dialectic of digestion and resistance reverberating across multiple works. In this festival report, I introduce the opposition of food and freedom (as presented to the festival audience by drag artist Soya the Cow) and discuss how a global neoliberal regime reduces the distance between the two. I then discuss the appearance of the resistant body moving in defiance of regimes of capital and choreopolicing, as manifested across works created by artists Tamara Cubas, Luis Garay, Wellington Gadelha, Alice Ripoll/REC, and Vincent Riebeek. My engagement with these works locates a hope in the persistence of unruly bodies, and in the meaningful recognition (rather than consumption) of the other that the festival offered.